


Pity No More

by chantefable



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canon Timeline, Cold War, M/M, Partnership, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soviet Union, Spies & Secret Agents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-08
Updated: 2015-11-08
Packaged: 2018-04-30 15:35:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5169140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chantefable/pseuds/chantefable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His ‘soulmate’ is a dreary shade over his life, and Illya has no patience for it. He will not give Napoleon Solo more of his time or attention than the current mission demands. The faster they end all this, the better.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pity No More

And mutual fear brings peace;  
Till the selfish loves increase.  
Then Cruelty knits a snare,  
And spreads his baits with care.

William Blake

His soulmate is a dreary shade over his life, and Illya has no patience for it. He will not give Napoleon Solo more of his time or attention than the current mission demands. The faster they end all this, the better. Illya has already chosen his own shadow.

Solo’s eyes are bright and full of incomprehension. They are cruel and gleeful, with a foreign fire dancing in them: tongues of fiery flames that swallow entire cities. Illya can easily believe that he is a dangerous, greedy thief. Their handlers, obviously well aware of their twisted circumstances and confident in the course of action, leave them alone at the table and Solo immediately baits Illya, prods him like a fool would prod a chained bear at the fair. Silly American. He must think that the ugly brands on their skin mean something more than they really do, that the Cyrillic script above Solo’s thick wrist makes him entitled to something. The sun is gentle and the light is soft, trembling and transparent, but at the café by the water, Solo’s hard blue eyes are all pupil and he is shooting in the dark, desperate to hurt and to get a reaction out of Illya.

Illya gives him a reaction. He will not give Solo anything else.

Neither the documented corruption of Illya’s father (real, commonplace, nothing outstanding about it compared to others, not even the number of people who starved because of his machinations) nor the alleged promiscuity of Illya’s mother (once, perhaps, earlier, when they had been younger and Illya had been a small child, but not after; after, her bed was cold and her eyes were bleak) are insults that truly hurt. What grates on Illya’s nerves is the American’s voice, his presence and the fact that he exists in the first place. Illya doesn’t need him. Irritation reaches boiling point and then Illya’s fingers twitch and he shoves the table out of the way just to end this mockery of a conversation. He never wanted this. Why the hell have they met, even.

Illya leaves and Solo throws some trite phrase after him, hungry anticipation poorly concealed in his voice. Who knows what he is even thinking about, that sleek rascal on a leash of the Central Intelligence Agency, what does he imagine. That night, Illya’s dreams are an interminable danse macabre of fleeting shapes that dart through empty streets and leap over high walls. Unfortunately, reality comes crashing back in the morning. Illya vaguely regrets not killing Solo earlier, when he hadn’t known his name and they hadn’t been partnered on a joint mission. He should have strangled him in the public men’s room. Illya’s hands around Solo’s throat felt exactly right.

Days drag on and Solo’s bravado is stifling. He obstinately ignores Illya’s pointed silence concerning the obvious (his incongruous name on Illya’s skin, raised scars shaped like someone’s sloppy handwriting, measured and photographed and attached to Illya’s dossier) and doesn’t say anything himself, but he walks and breathes too close to Illya, as if to muddle the waters. All the time, Solo assaults him with unwelcome advice and personal opinions, as though Illya is supposed to care what Solo thinks about couture, breaking and entering, and personal space. Solo acts as if there is nothing personal any longer, not Illya’s sparkling lust for Gaby Teller, not his relationship with his handler, nothing. As if Illya’s body is no longer his own. 

It isn’t, but it is definitely not Solo’s, either.

Solo’s closeness is dismal and oppressing, a new kind of weight on Illya’s shoulders. Just how much is he supposed to carry. 

When Solo pulls Illya out of the water, manhandles him in a proprietary way and rides the Vespa as if there is something settled between them, Illya wants to howl. He does not need rescuing, not from his soulmate. Why can’t Solo just act like a fellow agent, why is he cleaving Illya open with his care. Illya never wanted that. He accepts no bonds. Fear has been his caretaker and Illya accepts no substitutes. The annoying letters of the Latin alphabet on Illya’s wrist mean nothing, and the most grating thing about this idiotic situation is that Solo _knows this_. The American is a damn adult in a filthy line of work, he knows that soulmates do not always end up together and often don’t even like each other. His silent claims upon Illya are ridiculous. Furious and chilled to the bone, Illya falls into a fitful slumber on the way to Rome, his arms tight around Solo’s thick torso.

The Committee for State Security casts a long thick shadow, and in it, Illya sleeps. It is quiet in the dark. Peaceful. There is no din in the shade, no moan or whisper penetrating the darkness. Illya is a wisp of black, striking from the lightless silence. The dark shadow accepts no doubt, no strange forays, just mindless execution of the plan. And so Illya lives, year after year in somnambular peace, doing what he is told to do with ruthless efficiency. He is a Stakhanovite agent. His work is neat, precise, literal. An unimaginative game of chess with a predictable result. In the dark, he utters no questions and sees no evil. In the dark, everything looks black: the blood on Illya’s hands and the typed letters in official notifications.

For a brief, satisfying moment, Illya is a tendril of darkness at the hotel as they race upstairs to outrun Victoria Vinciguerra. Once he is back in his room, Gaby warm and uncomplicated next to him, he feels ordinary. Mindless execution of the plan, cutting off the audio signal from the American who does not need back up, quiet downtime with a game of chess. A woman who is simply desirable getting drunk by his side. For a brief, satisfying moment, life is simple and predictable, and Illya simply desires a convenient woman who slaps him and tackles him to the floor. But then she passes out, breathing alcohol fumes into Illya’s shirt. And all Illya does is pick her up, irreproachably tender, and lay her to sleep.

_Not a man, but a cloud in trousers._

He stays awake that night, soundlessly recites whatever lines of Mayakovsky’s poem he can remember and keeps rubbing the skin of his wrist. It feels raw in the early morning, when Victoria Vinciguerra finally leaves the hotel.

Illya’s soulmate is a dreary shade over his life, and his patience has long been worn thin. As a child, he wondered about the name, imagined something foolish and hopelessly romantic, like a young bold Italian antifascist with whom Illya would fight side by side for a better future, the red sun rising everywhere. Ridiculous fantasies, but perfectly natural, Illya thinks, watching his own face in the mirror as he lathers his cheeks and shaves. There is an imprint of another face in his features, a hint of a sweet English rose who fell a little in love with his dashing father in the tumultuous twenties. His mother often fell a little in love back then, but one Comrade Kuryakin was somehow captivating enough for a brilliant English communist to move to another country. The razor slides over Illya’s skin, a close shave. To think that she miraculously made it through the thirties, when the People’s Commissariat for State Security went on a rampage, and did not meet the fate of so many other foreign-born communists living in the Soviet Union – and then had the flame snuffed out from her eyes when Illya’s father was caught red-handed. She used to be so beautiful, so vibrant. 

Afterwards, when Illya finally gets to Solo and releases him from the chair, Solo’s defeated eyes mercilessly remind Illya of his mother’s. 

The faster it all ends, the better. Illya does not want any of this. He hasn’t wanted to fight shoulder to shoulder with the one whose name is branded on his skin in a foreign language for a very, very long time. He thinks back at his younger self, constantly casting jealous glances at other people’s wrists in recruit school. Smooth lines of Georgian, Armenian, and Arabic were a source of envy; Latin characters – Estonian, Lithuanian, even Czech – mocked him with something that could have been. But no, out of all possible options, Illya’s damn skin gave him someone who wasn’t an option at all. Definitely not for a son of a traitor to the country and a potentially dangerous foreigner. Illya buried his dreams of an anonymous Italian partisan a very long time ago.

When Illya predictably hears, _kill the American if necessary_ , it is nothing new or strange, nothing that merits a question. On the island, Illya’s work is neat, precise, ruthlessly efficient. He is in pursuit, striking like a merciless creature of the dark, and the death of Alexander Vinciguerra is inevitable. Get the bishop out of the way, get to the queen. But once Illya has played the combination, he notices something new and strange lodged in his chest, an unfamiliar disquiet. Solo’s proximity continues to be dismal, but it will be short-lived. It will.

It will, repeats to himself Illya when the Diadema goes up in flames and their international game of chess is over. An unfamiliar chill creeps down his spine as he watches Solo go. There are no options, none. Solo disappears in his hotel room, disheveled, sweaty and weary. The last Illya sees of him is Solo rubbing absent-minded circles on his bruised wrist.

After the phone call from his handler, Illya loses time. He is aware of the horrible din, of rough, cracking noises penetrating his erstwhile silent darkness, like bones or furniture breaking, and someone groans like they are dying, really close. Maybe it’s just a fractured memory, one of many. Maybe it’s Illya. He dissolves into rage, mindless and, against all odds, perversely peaceful. He reaches Solo’s door like a somnambulist and blinks once, twice, steadies his hand. His hands felt oddly right around Solo’s hot throat, didn’t they?

He almost kills his soulmate. Almost. Solo throws his father’s watch at him like a live grenade and announces that they will destroy the disc, just like that. As if his life is not his own, Illya watches Solo burn the stubbornly resisting piece of plastic and metal in the ashtray. Solo is freshly showered and once again impeccably dressed, and he acts like there is nothing out of the ordinary while he takes Udo Teller’s research out of the equation. It is bold and idiotic. The Central Intelligence Agency will have his head for direct violation of orders as soon as they have Solo in their paws. Solo, apparently unconcerned, just sips his drink slowly on the balcony, bathed in the soft, trembling sunlight.

When Alexander Waverly walks in, his uncanny agent at his side, and cuts them all off from their previous lives with a flippant but heavy-weight phrase, Illya drinks down his own glass. The alcohol burns inside his throat and all the way down to his stomach. He looks over at Solo and abruptly notices the way their bodies are queerly angled towards each other, as if they inhabit the same undetermined space. Solo’s eyes are bright and full of something awfully intimate, perhaps even vulnerable. They cut Illya like broken glass.

With ragged mirth, Illya thinks that he did end up fighting the bloody fascists in Italy alongside his unbelievable, intrepid soulmate after all. His father’s watch is snug around his wrist. He takes a lazy step and leans his back against the balcony railing, shoulder to shoulder with Solo, close enough to feel the sizzling energy emanating from him, close enough to touch. Illya could easily run his hands down Solo’s throat just then, down his body, be greedy and proprietary everywhere.

The shadows shrink and hide inside Illya’s soul and he stands quiet, lifting his face to the terrific sunshine.

Of course, it will all end very soon. But not today.

**Author's Note:**

> Accidentally inspired by a prompt with some challenging backstory ideas for Illya’s parents, which can be roughly summarized as: his mother was English, part of the reason his father embezzled money was to organize their escape from the USSR because of the treatment of Illya’s mother, and the foreign name of his soulmate gives Illya angst. At first, I thought that was all quite improbable, and then (le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point…) made a quixotic attempt to research and construct a historically accurate sequence of unlikely events that could maybe make it work. 
> 
> Assume: that in the 1920s, Illya’s father was away on diplomatic and/or covert missions abroad, contacting with foreign communists, that Illya’s mother was an English communist activist and that they met, married and went to live in the USSR; that in the 1930s, Illya’s mother was not subjected to the repressions against the foreign communists living in the USSR by the Joint State Political Directorate or the Main Directorate of State Security, or if she was interned, then briefly and returned relatively unscathed, and that if Illya’s father had the influence protect Illya’s mother during the Nikolai Yezhov purges, he himself was not prosecuted during the Lavrentiy Beria purges; that Illya’s father embezzled money, which given the time period and his position meant treason, but if he had plans to organize the emigration of Illya’s mother and Illya (and himself) from the USSR, it was not discovered (because then, with the additional conspiracy charges, the harshness of actions to be taken against Illya’s mother and underage Illya as ‘family members of traitors of the motherland’ increases); that if Illya’s mother was sentenced to labor camps as wife to a traitor of the motherland, it was either five years and she survived, or she was vouched for and avoided the camps in favor of immediate resettlement to distant regions (at this point the suspension of disbelief is so great, we can assume that since she wasn’t executed as an English spy during the great purges in the late 1930s, she was either someone famous and important in the international communist movement or had benefactors at the very top of the government, or both); that Illya, likely classified as a socially dangerous child, was not sent to labor camps or corrective labor colonies, but to a special regimen orphanage, where the staff was trained by the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, and from there, his career path to KGB is actually quite clear and not implausible. 
> 
> It’s a lot of _if_ , but within this nebulous hypothetical scenario, the suggested circumstances are not, theoretically, entirely impossible.
> 
> Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893 - 1930): poet of the Russian Futurist movement.  
> The poem ‘A Cloud in Trousers’ (1915) is quoted and referenced according to the Patricia Blake (ed.) English translation (1975):  
> If you wish, / I shall grow irreproachably tender: / not a man, but a cloud in trousers!
> 
> Epigraph from ‘The Human Abstract’, a poem by William Blake.


End file.
